Bill Clinton Discusses his “Plant-Based Diet”

Forget about the Yahoo/Huffington Post video I blogged last week that featured Bill Clinton talking about his near-vegan diet. I’m now wishing it was never released, because it sort of stole the thunder from this new video with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that is a hundred times better. I hope you’ll do everything possible to share this video; it’s hard to imagine Clinton giving a greater endorsement to a vegan or near-vegan diet.

Clinton goes into great detail about his current diet:

I went on essentially a plant-based diet. I live on beans, legumes, vegetables, fruit. I drink a protein supplement every morning—no dairy—I drink almond milk mixed in with fruit and a protein powder so I get the protein for the day when I start the day up. And it changed my whole metabolism and I lost 24 pounds and I got back to basically what I weighed in high school.

But I did it for a different reason, I mean I wanted to lose a little weight but I didn’t dream this would happen. I did it because after I had this stent put in I realized that even though it happens quite often that after you have bypasses, you lose the veins because they’re thinner and weaker than arteries the truth is that it clogged up, which means that the cholesterol was still causing buildup in my vein that was part of my bypass, and thank God I could take the stents. I didn’t want it to happen again.

So I did all his research and I saw that 82 percent of the people since 1986 who have gone on a plant-based, no dairy or meat of any kind, no chicken, turkey—I eat very little fish, once in a while I’ll have a little fish; not often—if you can do it, 82 percent of the people who have done that have begun to heal themselves. Their arterial blockage cleans up, the calcium deposit around their heart breaks up. This movement has been led by a doctor named Caldwell Esselstyn at the Cleveland Clinic, Dean Ornish who you know out in California, the doctors Campbell (father and son) who wrote The China Study, and a handful of others. But we now have 25 years of evidence and I thought that, well, since I needed to lose a little weight for Chelsea’s wedding, I’ll become part of this experiment. I’ll see if I can be one of those that can have a self-clearing mechanism—we’ll see…

Hillary and I, we’re happy, we love our son in law, and we admire him, and we’d like to be around if there are grandkids—we want to be able to do our part.

Thanks to Clinton, I’m betting we’re going to see hundreds of thousands—perhaps even millions—of baby boomers turning to vegan diets as a way to deal with their diet-related degenerative diseases. This video is one of the most exciting things I’ve seen in all my time as a vegan advocate. Please do whatever you can to share it via Facebook, Twitter, or email. (Via Derek.) Link.